Each choice we make is a vote for the kind of world we want to live in. The mission of ‘Adapt – A Permaculture Game’ is to educate individuals and groups how to design in the ethics and principles of Permaculture to each aspect of our lives. We will play through the creating of a world to thrive in by applying principles, patterns, and collective knowledge pools to cultivate caring choices for our communities and our own self-care needs.  This playshop will provide you with the inside scoop on the evolutionary teaching tool – ‘Adapt’ – while participating in a few rounds of game play. Explore with us the many ways in which this game and its pieces can be used through out a multitude of educational environments and community development.

Presented By: Bridget O’Brien

Sunday September 18th | 12:30 – 1:30 PM | Bioregional Hub

Come play with clay! Get your hands dirty and learn one of the coolest ways to build with natural material.  For children of all ages, come explore the messy and enchanting world of cob. Less see what we can build!

Presented by: Nico Morris

Check in at the Cob Building Station. Events will happen spontaneously throughout the event.

Colin is the Co-Director for Rooted in Resilience co-leading organizational management and development, and managing programs of the Local Clean Energy Alliance. In 2013, he coordinated the Alliance’s fourth annual Clean Power, Healthy Communities Conference. Colin graduated from Stanford University in 2007 with a BA in Urban Studies and a self-designed concentration in Environmental Justice: Race, Poverty and the Environment. After graduating, Colin taught for several years multiple-subject English Language Development at Coliseum College Prep Academy in East Oakland. After teaching, Colin worked with the Greenlining Institute, Urban Habitat, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and the Oakland Climate Action Coalition to advance racial, environmental, economic, and climate justice. In addition to being an activist and organizer, Colin is also a musician, capoeirista, and educator. He has lived in Brazil for four years, and speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese.

2016 Convergence Workshop: Growing Justice

2016 Convergence Workshop: Community Choice Energy: A Pathway to Resilient, Energy-Secure Communities with Megan O’Neil

Corrine Van Hook-Turner Corrine is the Co-Director for Bay Localize co-leading organizational management, strategy and development. She also manages communications and outreach. As a former IDEAL Scholar, she witnessed and continues to witness the compelling impact of investing in youth and disenfranchised communities so that leadership can reflect the real diversity it seeks to serve. She has developed her talents working with the Rockwood Leadership Institute, Greater New Beginnings Youth Services, and through contracting with various organizations. Corrine holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. She hopes to learn, educate, and urge communities to be more proactive in functioning within their environment so we can create and maintain sustainable futures.

2016 Convergence Workshop: Growing Justice

The Embodying Permaculture workshop is an interactive experience that integrates the permaculture principles and ethics with body-centered awareness practices including transformational theater, collective musical creation, and guided exercises that activate the 5 senses. We complete this journey with a solution-focused discussion counsel, culminating in the cultivation of direct action plans for co-creating a thriving, resilient, regenerative global ecosystem.

This workshop is all about integrating the permaculture concepts into our being in a physical, interactive and fun way. It builds bridges between those who are drawn to movement, music, theater and the arts, with the ideas and practices of permaculture. I have facilitated this workshop in many diverse locations and events, and have always received very positive feedback. This workshops will help grow our movement by engaging participants with permaculture in a new way that is interactive and empowering. By ending with direct action plans that are supported by the group, participants will leave with a plan to be a positive change-maker, and the resources and inspiration to follow through.
By offering this workshop at the convergence, it will also draw those in the Blooming Biodiversity network to the BRC.

Presented By: Robin Liepman

Town and City Permaculture will put on an interactive workshop. About how diversity helps permaculture truly realize it’s expressed ethics. We will delve into, how can we design. For inclusivity within the permaculture movement.

Our workshop will be interactive. It is relevant to Building Resilient Communities and permaculture. In the way that we will be focusing. On how to bring POC, food workers, migrant workers, and other under represented folks. To the permaculture table for a much needed pow wow.

Presented By: Troy Horton and Sasha Shankar

Youth leaders will share their story about how/why they planned and implemented an urban food forest on their school campus that features a self-illustrated mural of the solutions they want to see in their community. They will invite participants to share or work on the planning/implementation projects of their own that centers building resilience and meeting basic needs in their community.

Presented By: Corrine Van Hook-Turner

Jillian is an experienced practitioner of regenerative systems living, who works creatively and collaboratively with others, applying whole systems design principles to a wide range of projects: from urban balconies, to entire ecovillages. The founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Living Network in Canada, Jillian has taught and consulted in 30 countires in North & Central America, the UK & Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

2016 Convergence Workshop: Urban Permaculture: From Toronto to Tel Aviv

Robin Liepman (Bloom) is a co-founder and co-organizer of the Blooming Biodiversity Permaculture Tour (www.BloomingBiodiversity.org). He is a world traveller, here to re-weave the dream of the modern world into a vibrant balanced existence. Bloom was born from the warm coastal womb of central California in San Luis Obispo, educated by the fairies and tree people at the University of California Santa Cruz with a degree in Psychology and Cognitive Science, (and a special focus on life, the universe and everything,) and initiated into the intergalactic tribe of awakening beings during his six months of travel through Central America, becoming initiated into the modern day mystery school via volunteering at an endless stream of transformational festivals. He then went on a spiritual pilgrimage through Peru and Bolivia, emerging with a strengthened sense of life path and purpose, re-visited Costa Rica, and is now on Vancouver Island in Canada for his Permaculture Design Course/Earth Activist Training with Starhawk and friends. He recently co-organized and co-lead the “”Blooming Biodiversity”” permaculture tour, traveling of the North American West Coast, Hawaii (Big Island, Maui & Kauaii), and Peru, with a team called “Solutionary Production.”” This tour was a journey of healing the world through holistic integrative permaculture activations worldwide. Bloom has a solo music project (www.BloomSounds.org) and also has a music project called Blooming Anahata (www.BloomingAnahata.org) with his partner Anahata.
Bloom is dedicated to co-cultivating a thriving, equitable, regenerative, healthy and vibrant existence that works well for all beings.

2016 Convergence Workshop: Embodying Permaculture

Ruthie King grew up in Southern California before heading east to attend Columbia University, where she studied planning and design with a focus on ways to integrate sustainability into the built environment. After graduating with a degree in Architecture and Sustainable Development, she moved to Washington State to live and work on farms practicing alternative construction and natural building techniques. This included cob and earth structures, converted shipping containers, living roof structures and more. After working on sustainable building and barn restoration at several farms in the area, she landed at a beautiful historic dairy barn with a family hoping to bring dairy cows back to their land. She worked with the family to develop the framework for maintaining and milking a small herd of cows while selling the raw milk and cheese on site. Concurrently working for a veterinarian in town and substitute teaching at the public school gave her confidence working with animals and children. In 2013, she moved to the James Ranch in Colorado, a produce, eggs, pork, and grass-fed beef and dairy farm. There she studied integrated and diverse farming structures, and engaged in the daily milking routine and CSA operations. Finally, she joined the Grange School in early 2014 to help launch the program. Her diverse skillset has prepared her for the enormous, rewarding task of leading the operations for The Grange School of Adaptive Agriculture.

2016 Convergence Workshop: What is Adaptive Agriculture?

Sasha Shankar is the president of Town and City Permaculture.

TBA

The Third Ethic: Practicing Fair Share Permaculture

Troy Horton of Town and City Permaculture. Is a grass-roots permaculture practitioner based in Oakland, CA. He has a strong focus on introducing “inner-city youth” and their communites to permaculture.
He has organized and held a previous permaculture diversity talk/event, along with being a constant student of permaculture and completed several PDC’s.

TBA

The Third Ethic: Practicing Fair Share Permaculture

With so many categories, ideologies, philosophies, styles of growing food sustainably, it is challenging for beginning farmers to enter the local food system with their own identity. Adaptive Agriculture is the concept that the science, art, and business of growing food is going to be entirely unique to the individual or group managing the system, and it MUST be flexible enough to change. Defining your context requires: identification of your values and intentions, placing yourself consciously in your surrounding ecology, and understanding the markets and communities of which you are a participant. Our contexts are constantly in flux, and adaptive agriculture necessitates an awareness and openness to change.

This is relevant to a community that loves labels and recipes, and it helps encourage questioning, skepticism, and constant observation. The idea that our world is constantly changing, that boundaries are constantly blurring, is central to the theme of adaptive agriculture and also central to the idea of building bridges! We encourage adaptive agriculturalists to look at all the ideologies and strategies and pick and choose to create their own unique form of agriculture based on their context and perspective.

Presented By: Ruthie King